[ale] erasing a hard drive

[David Ritchie]

Modern drives often have a secure erase capability built into the
firmware of the drive, that, once triggered,
can not be stopped (i.e. you pull power from the drive - when power is
restored, the drive will say 'Hey! I
was erasing my data and was interrupted - I will continue again..."


. How well this is protected by system firmware, etc. is not clear.
The media group at UCSD has
some papers on the subject if you poke around google... dd
if=/dev/random of=/dev/rdsk/...
is sufficent for most use, dban for PCI/HIPAA compliance, eban if you
need an audit trail,
hammer and over the for the military and NSA...

Best regards,
Dave